Crucial BX500 SATA SSD: An affordable upgrade drive

Add a lot of storage to your laptop for a budget price.

- JON L. JACOBI

Crucial’s BX500 internal SSD offers a lot of capacity for not so much cash, along with great everyday, real-world performance. Most users will be perfectly happy with this QLC drive, as long as they don’t bang on it too hard—as in writing large amounts of data in a short period of time, or filling the drive to point where it runs out of NAND to treat as cache. At that point, write performance drops to around the hard-drive level.

DESIGN AND PRICE

The BX500 is a 7-mm-thick, super-light, 2.5-inch SATA 6Gbps SSD. It comes in several flavors: The 2TB capacity we tested (currently $200 on Amazon), 1TB ($90 on Amazon [go.pcworld.com/90am]) , 480GB ($55 on Amazon [go.pcworld.com/55am]), and 240GB ($39.95 on Amazon [go. pcworld.com/39am]). That’s about as cheap as you’ll find, not to mention a rather interesting mix of capacities.

Normally you’ll see 250GB and 500GB drives sold in product lines that feature 1TB and 2TB models, or conversely, 980GB and 1920GB with 240GB and 480GB drives. This is due to the percentage of NAND used for overprovisioning (allotting spare cells as replacements). Crucial obviously feels that the lower-capacity BX500s require more, which might have something to do with intelligent caching. Or not.

The BX500 employs a Silicon Motion SM2259XT controller. The four NAND chips inside our 2TB test model bore the OBY22NX894 marking. I found no reference to those NAND part numbers online; however, there were four chips on the rather small PC board inside the unit. The large drop in performance after running out of secondary cache during our long 450GB write test strongly suggests that it’s QLC or quad-level cell/4-bit (16 voltage levels).